Larry Page Runs Google From His Phone

Reporter

Google Inc., Wednesday, said it is improving its search capabilities so that users will be able to interact with the search engine using more natural language. The company said it is also working to add more contextual relevance to searches in an effort to provide increasingly customized search results.

As more workers rely on smartphones and tablets to do their jobs, it becomes increasingly helpful for those devices to have an awareness of the employee’s location or the task they’re performing Google Maps and other applications do this to a degree but Google wants to take it to the next level. Say you’re searching for restaurants in San Jose for a business lunch. It’s now possible to type into Google’s search engine “how far is it from here?” and for the search engine to understand that you’re in San Francisco and to call up the distance and approximate travel time.

“Google now gives you information without you having to ask – it understands the context of what you talked about before,” said Google CEO Larry Page, who took the stage at the end of the keynote at the Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference.

Before workers carried smartphones and tablets, context-aware computing wasn’t nearly as important because most employees were sitting at desks in an office. Yet, because mobile devices have a smaller form factor, search actions need to be a bit more intuitive to help workers be productive. For one thing, it’s more difficult to type on smartphones and tablets. That’s where a natural language search option can make sense. As smartphones have become easier to use, executives have grown to depend on them. “I can do most things I need to do to run the company from my phone,” said Mr. Page.

Google now has 900 million total activations of Android, up from 400 million last year. Phones and tablets running Android will now be able to recognize the context of a person’s activity, whether they’re walking, driving or cycling.

With smartphones and tablets continuing to grow in popularity, context is going to be more and more important, said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president of consumer technologies and markets at Gartner Inc. Google Maps and Google+, the company’s social network, will help knit together that context as both services provide information about physical and social context, she said.

Aside from Google Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are all working to develop context-aware technologies. Companies are expected to invest heavily in context-aware applications and technologies in coming years, with the market expected to reach nearly $120 billion in 2018 from $26.5 billion in 2013, according to a March report from MarketsandMarkets, a research and consulting firm.

Google wants to make it as easy to get information from a computer as it was for Star Trek Captain James T. Kirk aboard the USS Enterprise–a pop culture reference the company has used when describing its search goals. To that end, the company demonstrated that it’s possible to do a Google search by voice, using conversational language. “Today we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible,” said Mr. Page. “I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

In this second article in a two-part series, Sonny Garg, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at Exelon Corp., the $27.4 billion competitive energy provider based in Chicago, describes the structure and inner workings of his emerging technologies team.